Pages

Monday, June 4, 2012

Nothing Good Happens After Midnight

Today's post is brought to you by learning a lesson the hard way. Here's to hoping you can learn from my mistakes ;)

My father always told me, "Nothing good happens after midnight," and it turns out he was right!

I do my best to finish my work before the wee hours of the morning, but it's inevitable that some nights I just have to stay up and get some business cranked out while the others are sleeping. The benefit of this is that I really get a lot accomplished with a nice stretch of uninterrupted time, but unfortunately, my brain isn't the perkiest after a long days work of being a mommy, wife, cook, janitor, and artist.

Almost a year ago, when I first created Out Of Alabaster, I made two BIG mistakes that forever changed my late-night work routine. First, I inadvertently disclosed a client's payment information to the WRONG customer. *face palm* Secondly, I misspelled the name of a recently deceased child on a memorial portrait *beyond any face palm* Both cases were graciously received by my customers, and resolved; however, they could have been easily avoided by simply not sending out late-night e-mails.

As a result of these mistakes made in the wee hours of the night, I created a little rule for myself:

Let me encourage you to save your late night e-mails as drafts. They won't disappear! Get some sleep, give them a quick read over in the morning, proof your design work one last time, and then send your work on its way. You'll be amazed at how you can catch those silly errors that your sleepy eyes glanced over the night before :)

Tired eyes simply don't see embarrassing grammatical errors (ie. Let me see if I can fit you into my colander <-- another true story). They erroneously forward strings of e-mails to unsuspecting customers, and generally create all sorts of late-night fiascos! As business women (and moms, wives, cooks, janitors, and artists), we work too diligently for a 1:30am e-mail to tarnish our reputation or lower our standards of conduct with our customers.